Slavery in the Coffee and Chocolate Industries

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Transcript of Slavery in the Coffee and Chocolate Industries

Coffee Plantations in Latin America Held Responsible When you eat CHOCOLATE, you have MY BLOOD in your mouth. Production vs ConsumptionNew Report Exposes Child Labor Violations The US Department of Labor recently released a report stating that over 71 nations are guilty of using forced child labor in the production of coffee beans. Colombia and Nicaragua, two of the largest exporters of coffee, have been found to have some of the highest rates of illegal child labor in the world.

Even when coffee is not produced with child labor or slave labor, it is generally cultivated with exploited labor. Most of the world’s 25 million coffee growers receive less than one-percent of what most consumers pay for their daily cappuccino. To make matters worse, the price of coffee has fallen tremendously over the past few decades.The falling price has directly resulted in an increase in destitution and starvation in places such as Nicaragua and Ethiopia.

$1.20Friday, May 30, 2014Joshua Lee & Tommy ColbertCote D'ivoire Plantations Buy ChildrenBibliography In West Africa, cocoa is a crop grown primarily for export. As the chocolate industries grow, the demand for cheap cocoa grows also. Today, cocoa farmers can't live on just selling beans, which then often results of involving child labor.

The children of West Africa are surrounded by intense poverty and most begin working at a young age to help support their family. Some children end up on the cocoa farms because they need work and they are told the pay is good. Other children are “sold” by their own relatives to traffickers or to the farm owners, and it has also been documented that traffickers often abduct the young boys from small villages in neighboring African countries, such as Burkina Faso and Mali.

Once they have been taken to the cocoa farms, the children may not see their families for years, if ever. When a child is delivered to the farm by a family member, that relative collects a sum of money either up front or at the end of an agreed duration of labor. Unfortunately, the relatives do not realize that the children will be exposed to a dangerous work environment and deprived of an education.

Most of the children are between the ages of 12-16, but children as young as 7 have been filmed working on the farms. Some only stay for a few months, while others end up working on the cocoa farms through adulthood."Slavery in the Chocolate Industry." Food Empowerment Project. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 May 2014. <http://www.foodispower.org/slavery-chocolate/>.